Today, A Way Home Canada and the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness are releasing a revised version of our federal youth homelessness policy brief. Opportunities to influence public policy and investment concerning youth homelessness abound.

As described in previous blog posts, A Way Home Canada and the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness take a “solutions-focused advocacy” approach to working with government. This approach necessitates a rich process of engagement that foregrounds youth with lived experience and other key stakeholders, both within and outside of government. It means mining innovations in both policy and practice from around the world, as well as here at home. Most importantly, it is an exercise in deep listening that enables us to craft a vision for our collective role in preventing and ending youth homelessness. We believe that the Government of Canada, through the renewal of the Homelessness Partnering Strategy (HPS), has an opportunity to play a leadership role on the issue of youth homelessness. This policy brief provides a roadmap for the Government of Canada to follow.

If you’ll recall, we released a policy brief in April, 2016 that focused on translating the recently-announced investment in youth homelessness in the U.S. to the Canadian context. At that time, we noted that over the past 16 years, the Government of Canada, through its National Homelessness Initiative and the HPS, has actively supported communities across the country to address homelessness. While many communities have used part of their federal investment to support youth-focused programs and services, there has not been a strategic focus on youth homelessness since the early years of the program.

We believe that the time is NOW for the Government of Canada to make Canada’s most vulnerable youth a national priority, and that the process they are currently engaged in with the renewal of the HPS provides a rare opportunity to do just that.

Key components of our federal policy brief refresh include recommendations that expand and enhance HPS with a core component of the strategy focusing on supporting Housing First for Youth and youth homelessness prevention through community systems planning. Youth under the age of 25 require programs and services that address their unique developmental needs and issues. Additionally, the brief outlines that the resources provided at the federal level need to be flexible, meaningful, and timely to be client-driven and meet each young person’s needs within their local context.

Some key points include:

Priority must be given to prevention programs that divert and keep young people out of shelters and provide them with appropriate and adequate supports. Youth-specific prevention programs focus upstream to intervene well before a youth becomes homeless.

Without proper exit planning and supports, youth leaving corrections, physical/ mental health, and child welfare systems may also find themselves without a home.

Adapting Housing First to the needs of youth is critical for their housing success and a healthy transition to adulthood.

The vision of a distinct, youth-focused funding stream through the HPS focuses on four strategies:

Community Planning and Systems Coordination

HPS designated communities must begin to align and organize themselves around the issue of youth homelessness. Communities can’t simply respond to youth homelessness in the same way they respond to homelessness in general. An integrated response to youth engages child welfare, youth justice systems, education and income supports systems which means designated communities must leverage different stakeholders.

Program Interventions

Central to the HPS renewal should be program models that will enable communities to

make the shift to an approach that focuses more on prevention and helping young people exit homelessness. The proposed program interventions are based on research from Canada and elsewhere in the world (the U.S., UK, Australia and Scotland in particular). Many of these program models have a strong evidence base, while others are promising practices. These models can be applied in urban, suburban, rural and remote communities.

Governance and Structure

Federal leadership, direction and investment on the issue of youth homelessness can yield significant policy and practice changes provincially and territorially. This will create the context for greater alignment of policy and funding, sharing of practices and creating a pan-Canadian strategy. The goal of an Federal/Provincial/Territorial (FPT)

Youth Homelessness Committee would be to align mandates across all provinces to promote increased focus and a more integrated response to youth homelessness and collaborate/support initiatives that contribute to the renewed HPS youth specific outcomes, performance measures and data demographics. In addition the FPT Committee would strengthen the ability of existing systems to intervene in a rapid, coordinated manner before youth become entrenched in a homeless lifestyle and bring government and community stakeholders together to support and enable community-driven responses and client-centered approaches to addressing homelessness.

Data Collection and Research

We have a significant opportunity to resolve the information gaps that currently make it challenging to understand and address youth homelessness. Better data and information on the issue of youth homelessness in Canada is a priority, as is evaluating methods of effective implementation, and the effectiveness of services and systems. Improving the collection of information will allow us to better respond to the following questions:

What are effective strategies for implementing and scaling evidence based and supported interventions for homeless youth?

What systems would support the implementation of common databases and metrics to enhance evaluation efforts nationally?

What is the composition and size of the homeless youth population in Canada?

As we’ve shown with the success of A Way Home Canada and the emergence of A Way Home coalitions in countries and communities around the world, Canada can be a world leader concerning youth homelessness. Most importantly, Canada can help ensure that every young person has the support they need to have a healthy transition to adulthood and the opportunity to reach their full potential.

To end homelessness, we have to prevent it from happening in the first place. But how do communities shift to prevention? And how do we engage in prevention consistently and on a national scale for maximum impact?

The Canadian Observatory on Homelessness (COH) has developed a plan for the federal government to prioritize prevention. This plan, when coupled with the current investment in Housing First, will create positive outcomes for those at risk of, or experiencing, homelessness. Leading the Way: Reimagining Federal Leadership on Preventing Homelessness sets out to describe what prevention is, the federal government’s role in preventing homelessness, and why and how prevention should be made a pillar of a national strategy on homelessness.

The release of the policy brief comes at an important time. The federal government is currently redesigning and expanding the federal body on homelessness – the Homelessness Partnering Strategy (HPS). The federal government has committed to investing $2.1 billion over 11 years dedicated to reducing homelessness for 500,000 Canadians. The government has convened an Advisory Committee on Homelessness, made up of experts on homelessness from across Canada, to advise them as they develop the new strategy. The COH has submitted Leading the Way to the Advisory Committee to inform their thinking on prevention. The brief advises the Committee to position homelessness prevention at the forefront of the redesigned strategy.

There is precedent for the federal government to take on such a bold initiative. In 2013, the HPS renewal centered around an investment in Housing First, where large communities were directed to use 65% of their funding towards Housing First initiatives. This same ambitious policy shift can be used in 2017, this time to prioritize prevention.

The time is right for a shift to prevention. Not only is the federal government redesigning their homelessness strategy, they are also in the midst of developing the National Housing Strategy and the Poverty Reduction Strategy. Combined, these three new strategies set the tone for a federal government poised to do more than simply manage the homelessness crisis. Shifting to prevention and supporting initiatives that will keep people from experiencing the trauma of homelessness provides the opportunity to do things differently.

The role of the federal government

Homelessness prevention is a fusion policy issue. This means that adequately addressing and preventing homelessness requires multiple sectors to take responsibility and work collaboratively. Housing, child and family services, health care, corrections, income support, education, and employment sectors all have a role to play in preventing homelessness.

So where does the federal government fit? The Government of Canada should take a leadership role in establishing policies and funding to implement a national prevention strategy. The progress made in adopting Housing First across the country under the guidance of the federal government is testament to the impact of federal leadership on encouraging systems change. The federal government brings to the table its unique ability to invest in long-term strategies and to bring innovative solutions to scale on a national level.

The homelessness prevention initiative: A four-point plan

Leading the Way offers a national homelessness prevention plan as part of the renewed national strategy on homelessness. The plan will complement the continued focus on Housing First to significantly reduce homelessness in Canada over the next ten years. The plan consists of:

1) Alignment: As part of a broader homelessness strategy, the homelessness prevention initiative must work alongside other government priorities to create a comprehensive approach to reducing homelessness and promoting equality and prosperity for all Canadians.

2) Investment: We can expect to see significant results only when policy frameworks are supported by financial investment. A shift to homelessness prevention requires a dedicated Prevention Funding Stream.

3) Innovation: The homelessness prevention initiative must include funding to support innovation and research to develop cost-efficient and locally contextualized programs.

4) Partnership: Preventing homelessness requires collaboration and shared responsibility between federal departments, across provinces and territories and in equal partnership with Indigenous communities.

Proof that prevention works

Homelessness prevention can and will reduce homelessness in Canada if adopted by the federal government. We know this to be true because there are examples around the world of state governments taking a stand and moving to prevention.

Wales recently passed legislation that mandated prevention services as a universal right. Already they have seen significant success in preventing individuals and families from experiencing homelessness. Similarly, Finland developed an action plan for preventing homelessness that ensures that anyone who touches the service system has housing. Australia has been at the forefront of preventing youth homelessness for close to twenty years. Back at home, Medicine Hat’s success with the Housing First model has made it clear that prevention is the other side of the coin in efforts to end homelessness. Cities such as St. John’s, Calgary, Edmonton, and Yellowknife have all incorporated prevention into their community plans to reduce and end homelessness.

With the leadership and financial backing of the federal government, homelessness prevention programs will be developed, expanded, and scaled up across Canada. The redesign of the national homelessness strategy is an opportunity for the Government of Canada to be bold, innovative, and forward-thinking, and to help Canadians access and maintain their homes.

People experiencing homelessness in Canada include a disproportionate number of individuals from racialized and newcomer communities. Racialized persons are defined as individuals who are non-Caucasian. Factors such as discrimination, language barriers, historical trauma and colonization have a cumulative effect -- they are also linked to experiencing homelessness and being unable to break the cycle of homelessness in Canadian society.

Because the realities experienced by individuals who are part of racialized and newcomer communities are different from that of other communities, it is important to recognize the unique challenges they may face. Connecting individuals to resources that are culturally appropriate makes it possible for their needs to be effectively addressed.

Below are some of the marginalized groups in Canadian society, who are especially at risk for experiencing homelessness for a multitude of reasons:

Addressing these issues is not as simple as connecting individuals and families to social services and general resources. Cultural considerations need to be taken into account in order to properly address the issue of homelessness specific to Indigenous Peoples.

What Can Be Done?

Taking into account the many cultures present in Canada is an important step towards providing effective services. It has been said that homelessness is a culture, and that services delivered by individuals with first-hand experience may contribute to better outcomes. This may mean having more staff with a history of experiencing homelessness, or perhaps hiring more ethnically diverse teams to help administer services in a culturally appropriate way. This will mean taking into account the historical, social, political and economic contributions that have created homelessness for people from various backgrounds.

Services in British Columbia:

Aboriginal Homeless Outreach Program:

Serving communities in British Columbia and managed by the Aboriginal Housing Management Association (AHMA), this program provides outreach workers for Indigenous Peoples that are19 years and older who have housing and health concerns.

Services are free and outreach workers listen to the health and housing needs of individuals. Connections are made to appropriate services and housing that is available. Services are provided with an Indigenous Peoples specific perspective.

ISS of BC: Immigration and Settlement Services:

This organization is focused on providing services and supports to immigrants, including refugees. Services include settlement, education and employment programs. Support programs are offered in over 45 languages in the Metro Vancouver, Squamish and the Okanagan regions.

Indigenous Peoples-Specific Support and Programs in Alberta:

Shining Mountains:

This is an Indigenous Peoples-owned, staffed and operated charity that aims to provide a variety of programs to Indigenous Peoples who may be facing homelessness, domestic violence, living with HIV/AIDS and addictions. This charity also provides culturally-sensitive training, education and referral programs for organizations.

Aboriginal Driver's License Initiative:

This program helps Indigenous Peoples with obtaining and maintaining a valid driver’s licence. It recognizes the barriers a lack of transportation can pose to success in employment. The three main areas of the program focus on: bringing awareness to the issue, education and training to help persons who are a part of the Indigenous Peoples community obtain their driver’s licences, and the accessibility of registration services (particularly in remote areas of Alberta).

Urban Society for Aboriginal Youth (USAY):

This non-profit organization is focused on assisting Indigenousyouth in the urban setting of Calgary, Alberta. They aim to provide urban Indigenousyouth with services and resources such as career planning, business etiquette, personal finance, and Blackfoot teachings.

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The Community Workspace on Homelessness is an interactive, online platform that enables people to share information about and discuss issues related to homelessness. Different communities are able to share their knowledge, collaborate, and provide resources through this space.

Homelessness for families is an especially troubling issue, because most are single mothers who have experienced long histories of trauma related to violence and abuse. The presence of children also makes it disturbing. Moreover, demographic data from Calgary’s family shelters shows that half of the families are Indigenous and approximately 30% are newcomers to Canada.

Understanding homelessness for families and developing subsequent responses require an understanding of gender and culture-related pathways into homelessness. Our research project, “Understanding Mothers Experiencing Homelessness,” was grounded in critical social theory, which connects individual issues to structural issues of power and exclusion. This research method examines structural barriers and the implications of power differences, which can help us to understand inequities in service delivery and policy development for people considered vulnerable. This elevates the analysis away from “problems with individuals,” towards “problems with public systems,” allowing more holistic responses.

For this research, we spent 12 months conducting retrospective one-on-one interviews with 15 mothers. We also engaged a small group of mothers living in short-term housing and a committee of community-based service providers and government representatives to provide advice and guidance throughout the project.

Some of what we learned was anticipated as all the interviewees had experienced long-term poverty, violence and interactions with child intervention authorities. They also had limited social and familial supports.

What Did the Mothers Tell us?

What we did not anticipate, however, was the fact that most of the mothers who volunteered to participate were newcomers to Canada. All of them had experienced multiple types of abuse in childhood, by spouses, partners, government officials or by other authority figures. Because of this, all of them felt “trapped” between multiple public systems with emergency shelters as their only available form of support. Many of the mothers talked about difficulties proving their residency status in Canada due to their partners withholding documentation as form of control, or because they had fled a violent situation. Most were unable to access affordable housing, social assistance and health care because they had no identification and no means to access it. The biggest barriers to exiting homelessness were structural barriers, which were essentially “siloed policies” -- sectors that were not collaborating and complicated or inaccessible services. Also, shelter staff felt ill-equipped to deal with the complications of immigration policies and processes, and the complexity of trauma faced by mothers and children.

What Should We Do?

With the advice and guidance of our group of mothers and our community advisory committee, we developed several recommendations:

1) Enhance and expand the continuum of housing and support options in the family sector. Formalized partnerships between shelters and immigration/settlement agencies could help bridge gaps between the homelessness and immigration systems. Families need flexible funding for costs associated with processing status applications or obtaining identification and rent supplements that follow them. This means rent supplements can be portable – tied to the tenant and move with the tenant from unit to unit -- attached to a specific housing unit or program. For example, if a family is in a housing program for two years and has access to rent supplements and case management, they could keep their rent supplement even when they no longer need case management.

3) Recognize the complexity of family homelessness and focus on culture and trauma. Many of the women had experienced multiple forms of violence, sometimes at the hands of authority figures. An inherent fear of authority or retribution may impact discussions of violence, mental health or substance use. Women may not trust persons in authority including service providers, because of previous traumatic experiences at the hands of people they thought they could trust. More research is needed to develop a framework for cultured and trauma-informed care that is reflective of diverse and multiple experiences. One place to start is to recognize the profoundly difficult pathways into homelessness for women and children, and acknowledge that provision of housing without recognition of cultural experiences, and the need of supports for trauma, is not likely to lead to a sustainable end to homelessness.

4) Scan the eligibility criteria and data collection approaches of affordable housing providers. All of the women we interviewed experienced multiple barriers to accessing affordable housing. Many cited a lack of information, long wait lists or unclear rules about eligibility. There is also no transparent communication about the eligibility criteria of agency clients and/or any shared data on affordable housing clients. Calgary’s affordable housing “universe” is in need of an assessment of current capacity gaps, to make evidence-informed decisions about how to fill gaps and ensure the available housing is going to people who need it the most.

5) Increase efforts to prevent family violence. Multiple experiences of violence led the women to lose or jeopardize their social networks. These experiences drove them into poverty, which ultimately led to homelessness. Interagency collaboration outside of the homelessness sector, including those working in violence prevention, immigration and settlement agencies, legal advice and low-income legal support agencies, education and health care could lead to a “violence prevention task force,” which would develop and share best practices for identifying, screening and intervening for violence. Recognizing and preventing family violence is an upstream mechanism for preventing family homelessness.

Conclusion

If we can prevent multiple forms of violence and bridge gaps between immigration, homelessness and violence sectors to develop holistic supports for women, we have the potential to end and prevent homelessness for families. Continued increases in the number of families experiencing homelessness is unacceptable. It's time to change the way we tackle family homelessness.

The policy brief is based on the results of the 2016 pan-Canadian study on youth homelessness, “Without a Home: The National Youth Homelessness Survey,”which found 57.8% of youth experiencing homelessness reported some type of involvement with child protection services over their lifetime. Compared to Statistics Canada indicating that 0.3% of the general public receive child welfare services, youth experiencing homelessness are 193 times more likely to report interactions with the child welfare system. This finding should shock people; it suggests that we are falling short of obligation to protect and care for children and youth in Canada.

What’s even more outrageous, given the settler colonial context in Canada, is that Indigenous children and youth are over-represented in both child welfare services and among youth experiencing homelessness. In 2016, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ruled that the federal government discriminates against Indigenous children on reserve by failing to provide the same level of child welfare services that exist elsewhere. Both underfunding (levels of support are lower than the provincial average for children in care who are off reserve) and the approach to delivering care have systematically disadvantaged Indigenous children and youth.

Moreover, the survey also showed LGBTQ2S youth and racialized youth are disproportionately represented among young people experiencing homelessness across Canada due to systemic forms of discrimination.

The stark results of last year’s survey are consistent with previous studies conducted in Canada over the last decade. Structurally and systemically, youth-serving institutions and the Canadian government have been unable to ensure all young people living in Canada experience access to justice – that is, experiences of relational fairness in any institutional setting where policy and law are applied or produced. We have been similarly unable to ensure that all young people have access to the basic things they need to survive: nutritious food, clean water, safe and appropriate housing, and timely access to healthcare services, including those required for mental wellness.

When I was doing the field research for “Youth Work: An institutional ethnography of youth homelessness,” I was shocked to discover how many young people using an Ontario youth shelter had been involved, or were still involved, with the province’s child welfare services. The research suggested that there were insufficient safe and appropriate housing options for adolescent youth in care in some small towns. Once a young person had exhausted the available foster families and group homes designated for youth, there were few options available to the child welfare workers, seeking to ensure the young people in their care were stably housed. In turn, this housing instability often disrupted young people’s access to education and their connections with family and friends.

Over the course of two years of fieldwork, I sought opportunities to collaborate with the local Children’s Aid Society (CAS) agency to do some research for them about young people’s experiences in care, including changes youth would like to see to the delivery of housing supports. I also invited the child protection workers and other local professionals to participate in a professional development opportunities I organized for shelter staff, so that shelter workers could improve their understanding of the institutional and policy organization of other institutional contexts shaping the lives of young people staying at the shelter. Back then, I was a doctoral student desperate to ensure that the research I was doing made some difference to the people who were participating in the project -- youth experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity and the adults seeking to support them.

Since then, I have continued to walk the line between research and policy/practice change, working side-by-side with youth and community organizations to identify problematic policies and practices that contribute to processes of marginalization and exclusion, and thento try to do something about the problems we’ve identified. But it always feels as though this last part remains slightly out of reach. As I also continue to study the ways that knowledge can contribute to social and institutional change processes, I have learned that a certain timeliness or receptivity to an idea is as important as compelling evidence.

Almost a decade ago, when I was a doctoral student working away on my dissertation research with a youth shelter in a small Ontario town, we did some good things at the local level. But none of them led to wide-scale changes to the institutional policies and processes that background young people’s experiences of homelessness and other forms of exclusion. The conditions weren’t right -- there was no “A Way Home Canada,” a national grassroots movement to end youth homelessness. The “Homeless Hub” and the “Canadian Homelessness Research Network (renamed “Canadian Observatory on Homelessness” in 2012),” were in their infancies. Housing First was not a conceptual or pragmatic shift people were talking much about, and nobody was talking about prevention. A lot has changed since then and not just within the homelessness serving/policy/research sectors, but within the other institutional sectors that influence how/whether people experience housing precarity.

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On July 19th, Ontario released a blueprint for building a new system of licensed residential services for youth titled, “Safe and Caring Places for Children and Youth.” The blueprint is grounded in the experiences and insights of young people who have experienced residential care in this province. It highlights the importance of youth participation in policymaking processes and articulates a plan to ensure all young people receive safe, high-quality, culturally-appropriate residential care services, whether the use of residential services is part of a child welfare care agreement or protection order or because they are detained under the Youth Criminal Justice Act.

In 2014, the province of Alberta similarly raised the upper limit of eligibility for accessing The Support and Financial Assistance Agreement, a post-intervention service available to youth after the age of 18, to 24 years old. Since then, there has been an 80% increase in the number of agreements in the province over the last three years. By expanding the scope of eligibility to include more youth, young people have the opportunity to continue to access services and supports as they transition into adulthood.

Improving the quality, stability and appropriateness of housing and other supports for young people incare is an important way that child welfare organizations can contribute to the prevention of youth homelessness at the Primary Prevention level. Primary prevention of youth homelessness means “working upstream" to address structural and systems factors that more broadly contribute to precarious housing and the risk of homelessness for young people. Child welfare organizations can play a significant role in reducing housing precarity and increasing educational and social stability for young people who rely on residential services during adolescence.

Policy and practice moves to improve access to and experiences of services in Alberta and Ontario also suggest that provinces are paying attention to the ways that institutional practices and policies have contributed to the systemic marginalization of particular groups, andimportantly, the role the state can play in rectifying the problems they’ve had a hand in creating.

I encourage provincial and territorial governments to continue to show leadership in this regard. Involve young people in the policy-making process so as to ensure that the decisions we make about their lives and wellbeing reflect their experiences and knowledge. Young people have critical insights that we are wise to heed. Commit to making a substantive contribution to the prevention of youth homelessness by disrupting the flow of young people from state systems of care into housing precarity; intervening to ensure young people do not lose their housing; and ensuring young people who do experience homelessness are supported to become and remain stably housed.

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The Child Welfare and Youth Homelessness in Canada: A Proposal for Action outlines clear conceptual shifts that are required in order to work together to sever the links between child welfare involvement and youth homelessness. The conceptual shift that underpins all of the recommendations we make are a commitment to equity and human rights. All young people living in Canada have fundamental rights that are encoded in laws and treaties. Human rights treaties provide a constitutional or legal framework to ensure that all people experience fair and equal access to housing, education, healthcare, work, life, safety, justice, freedom of expression, freedom of movement, and freedom from discrimination.

Moreover, the state is responsible for ensuring all people experience these rights. Given the documented links between child welfare system involvement and youth homelessness, among other social, educational, and health issues experienced by children and youth who have been in state care, we need to ensure that the child welfare system actively supports the equitable inclusionand care of all young people. Research on the disproportionate involvement of Indigenous, racialized and LGBTQ2S youth in child welfare services and among street youth populations reveals systemic patterns of inequality, exclusion, and neglect are evident. Clearly, the state has failed to act on its responsibilities as a human rights protector.

Equality cannot be realized by treating everyone the same way. For equality to be realized, an equitable approach to policy-making and service delivery is required. This means putting the needs and experiences of those the state has failed at the forefront of policy and programmatic decision-making, including within the child welfare system and the youth homelessness sector. Following the release of the "Child Welfare and Youth Homelessness in Canada," The COH and A Way Home plans to follow up with the federal, provincial and territorial leaders. This would ensure there is an ongoing dialogue about the recomendations, allowing the COH and A Way Home to support ongoing policy development that align with the recommendations -- not as outsiders, but as partners.